The business world today is deluged by a tremendous amount of paperwork that is generated and used on a daily basis. For example, during the course of a typical court case tens of thousands of documents may be produced. Storing, managing, and retrieving information in this mountain of paper is time-consuming and costly. Worse yet, documents may be mis-filed or lost in the "system". Organizations may spend thousands of dollars attempting to organize this paper in a logical way, yet still find themselves unable to find important documents when necessary.
Even if a database of documents is well organized, it may be difficult to access years later. For example, once a lawsuit has concluded, documents are typically boxed and stored in a long-term storage facility. Such a process makes it exceedingly difficult to use the stored documents in a later case, even if they are well-organized and indexed. Consequently, the knowledge that once resided in the collection of documents may effectively be lost and never recovered.
Present records management systems, particularly those that manage documents in paper form, are also expensive, particularly if they are organized well enough to be accessed easily. The cost of this organization and management is passed directly to the public in the form of higher consumer prices.
Beyond the records management problems, document authentication presents additional problems. A considerable amount of time and money is spent supporting a notarization system that requires one to be physically present before a notary to sign a document or approve a statement.
Some companies are working on systems that are intended to alleviate one or more of these burdens. For example, electronic court filing software products, such as JusticeLink and WestFile, focus on the court-specific case management and electronic filing acceptance capabilities. They are unconcerned with files generated by users. JusticeLink offers electronic filing and subsequent sharing of filed documentation, but fails to offer content indexing, access to documents not filed with the court, publication, notarization, or other capabilities. WestFile allows indexing of documents that were electronically filed using the WestFile system, but it is therefore directed only at documents of public record.
Other systems, such as BackJack and Evault, attempt to provide network archiving. These solutions fail to offer customers a number of crucial services, such as content indexing, shared access, access auditing and control, digital signature, publication, or electronic filing. Consequently, they fall short of what could be considered an effective document management system.
Document management companies, such as Xerox, offer products geared towards internal document management. Their document management software allows a group of Intranet, and possibly Extranet, users to check-in and check-out documents while tracking changes. Their solution attempts to provide an internal document processing and control system for a single enterprise. Some of these companies offer an Intranet solution for internal company document management. This is often an extension of a network client/server based computing system as enterprise customers start using Intranet as the medium to share and use their resources. Since these companies require secure authentication by a user, the system cannot be used by those external to the system and thus document collaboration is only accomplished internally.
Legal Anywhere Collaborator 4.0 and Legal NetEx are still other software tools designed for the legal industry. Legal Anywhere Collaborator 4.0 is an Intranet/Extranet based tool designed specifically for attorneys and their clients to collaborate on document development related to a matter. Legal Anywhere includes features such as long term use, off-line operation, archiving, as well as development hosting and programming. Legal NetEx enables users to electronically send, receive, collaborate, file and store documents via the Internet with password security. Encryption is also available with Legal NetEx. But Legal NetEx fails to provide document archiving, electronic notarization, electronic filing and remote publication.
As is shown above, currently-available systems attempt to provide specific business applications over a network, but are unconcerned with providing an integrated service system. Thus, there exists a need for an easily accessible document management tool with facilities for content indexing, shared document accessing, access auditing, digital signature, publication and electronic filing.